Is democracy dying in the American mind? Here's what a survey reveals

On questions about how democracy works in the United States, respondents consider that ordinary citizens hold much less power than politicians, lobbies and special-interest groups

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville praised America’s egalitarian society but warned against the tyranny of an ignorant majority and the possibility of its democracy degenerating into soft authoritarianism. Sound familiar?

In April 2017, the International Panel on Social Progress conducted a survey on an Internet sample, provided by Qualtrics, of 1,041 individuals representative of the age and race composition of the adult population in the United States.

In a 2016 article in the Journal of Democracy, authors Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk find evidence of democratic “deconsolidation”